Science/Math Links

Echidne has a series about statistics. In her first installment she discussed the basics of sampling; in her second she’s explaining the basics of probability.

The discussion on Majikthise about emaciated models continues. The thread has plenty of smart people chiming in without flaming, and one annoying asshole. Revere, on the other hand, explains why as a public health issue, regulating models’ BMIs makes absolutely no sense.

Shelley breaks a distressing story about chemotherapy: it has negative effects on brain function. Breast cancer survivors who have had chemotherapy suffer from confusion and mental fog that can last for up to 10 years after treatment.

Fascism is creeping more and more into the US. No, I’m not talking about torture and imprisonment without trial, but about a new epidemiological database, which essentially Sinicizes American public health policy.

Months after the final confirmation of Perelman’s proof of the Poincaré Conjecture (though it was originally submitted four years ago, mind you), there’s a proof of another crucial problem in mathematics, the Navier-Stokes equations, which are applicable to a horde of problems in dynamics, such as airflow and weather prediction. The mathematician who solved the equations is a woman, which means that she probably stole the solution from a man and then lied that he raped her to have him jailed – men’s rights activists say so, so it must be true.